Dumaguete

THERE seems to be more vehicles on the old narrow city streets. More and bigger vehicles, as if the change wasn’t bad enough. I feel the resentment percolating until I realize I’m contributing to the transformation of the city, the one place I regard as home even though I was born in the island across.

The craziest thing I learned the past year in Manila was to cross Edsa Boulevard “patintero” style, all eight lanes or so during the late evening rush hours from school to home. So crossing the narrow city lanes here bustling with motorcycles and tricycles seems like child’s play.

Many of the motorcycle drivers still wear no helmets, but the tricycle drivers are still the most polite and considerate of pedestrians crossing wherever they want (even if the older but wider-bodied vehicles still make the trademark buzzing that is bound to be the last thing one hears before sleeping and after waking).

The best way to get around the city is to walk; the worst is to bring a car, which has to be parked. Dumaguete taught me to love walking, which was how I discovered that the Old San Francisco Bookstore, which was a favorite lunchtime rendezvous along P. del Rosario St. in Cebu City, had relocated to a private residence’s garage in Dumaguete. It’s no longer there now.

In the ongoing building boom, the presence of old haunts and disappearances of others reminds me of the variability of the value of impermanence. There are definitely more sights to explore, food to sample, and settings to create memories with on Instagram and Facebook.

Like traffic, queues now exist in Dumaguete, a place that once shut down in the Sundays of old and during Good Fridays and Black Saturdays. When I met my friend, Dumaguete-born, she drove us to Valencia, on the outskirts of the city. We were looking for coffee served in a place run by a couple that retired, cooked the food they served in a place full of books they read and vinyl LPs and 45rpms they still played and listened to.

Y. and I were disappointed. The sign outside the café said it was closed for the holidays. We made a longish trip for nothing.

Still, for someone like me still looking to glimpse that laidback soul of the old Dumaguete, it was good to know some folks still knew how to take a break and walk away from it all. May we all be as discerning and wise.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

• First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 30, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Word of the year

THE OXFORD word of the year 2018 is “toxic”.

I read the announcement on the last working day of the year, writing to meet the deadline of the last final paper of the semester with a mind already leaden from medicine taken to fight a rising fever and trying to swallow glasses of water with a throat rasping from a hard dry cough.

So, yeah, I agree with the Oxford editors on the word choice.

It’s an interesting journey for an adjective that was first used in English during the 17th century. Meaning “poisonous,” “toxic” has its roots in medieval Latin, “toxicum (poison),” which emanates from the Greek “toxikon pharmakon (bow poison)”.

According to en.oxforddictionaries.com, the ancient Greeks smeared poison on their arrowheads. The poison ensured that a mere scratch from an arrow meant certain death.

However, it is not the Greek word for poison that leapt to Latin but the Greek word for bow, bringing along the same meaning associated with the lethal and deadly.

There is no explanation why this is so.

The Oxford editors’ reasons behind the selection of the adjective are aptly illustrated, though, by the metaphor of a poisoned bow. Bearing deep cultural significance, the word of the year reflects the “ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year”.

In 2018, the editors noted a 45-percent increase in online searches of “toxic” on oxforddictionairies.com. These are the top 10 collocates, or pairings of “toxic” with another word, arranged in order of diminishing frequency: chemicals, masculinity, substance, gas, environment, relationship, culture, waste, algae, and air.

From my sickbed, the poisoned bow shot off for two prominent destinations: traffic and the Internet.

After getting seriously sick twice the moment I am home from studying in Metro Manila, I treat urban traffic with utmost distrust. There are strains of violence lurking in daily battles of commuting. I am not just talking of the screaming, victimising, and aggressing that I witness in other people; I’m also talking of deep, hidden wells of anger and frustration I expose in myself in commuting to connect A to B.

The same goes for online connections. I’m not even referring to trolls, which I don’t engage with. Of course, in the swamp of the Internet, it’s hard to distinguish the trolls from everyone else. Negativity is to the Internet what smog is to Metro Manila, Cebu City, or any urban center.

The self-righteousness that pushes every driver to stay on course and not give up an inch on the highways is not different from the instinct to scroll, post, and engage. I guess the Greeks win the point over the Romans: more lethal than poison is a vector.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 23, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

True believers

THE QUICKEST fix for reading on demand is comfort reading.

I take a cue from Rappaccini’s daughter and find a cure in the poison itself. Thank you, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Fiction is comfort reading, the flip side of a pedant’s purposive reading, noble in intention but futile in its attempt to edify the plebeian creature who sneezes in the company of dissertations and never outgrows a liking for make-belief, illustrated, if you please.

Queuing recently at the college’s photocopying service, I waited for the ring-bound copies of my research drafts when a dignified gentleman placed on the counter an old portfolio with an extremely respectful air. He then conducted a dispassionate but probing interrogation of the machine operator on how “the books” would be treated in the process of coming up with the “facsimiles” preserving the “original works of art”.

Before he could wind up his cross-examination, the operator walked off in a huff. The gentleman turned to me, pursuing his suit that the covers of the copies must even then, “at least,” be reproduced as close to the original “in tooled leather with gilt letters”.

Curious to see the titles of “the books,” I glanced at his briefcase, which he held protectively, with both palms spread downward, as if the creatures it withheld were delicate and skittish at the least sign of the uncultured.

The stories are not inside, he said, intercepting my look. The truly worthwhile ones are all in the head, he said to no one, apparently disappointed in a world lacking imagination. When the operator gave my ring-bound manuscripts, spawns of sleep-deprived night and dawns, I did not immediately recognize these impostors.

Why do we care for fiction, for creatures who, no matter how seemingly real, can never be true?

“The mirror of fantasy” allows us a glimpse of what “fall(s) through the cracks,” wrote Neil Gaiman. Fiction is a mirror that shows us sometimes the “things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all, for the first time”.

Some journalists, after a habit of writing based on information that has carefully been verified with multiple sources, find they are immobilized by an appeal to write using the “imaginary”.

While I listened to the gentleman brood over the reproduction of “the books,” of whose existence he was the only one privy to, I was skeptical about his sanity.

Yet, for true believers, faith is not in the proof. It is in the narrator’s insistence to bring forth a story.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 16, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Breathless

I COULD say I write when it is still dark outside, too dark to see the weeds grown rampant, the lithe forms I imagine surging under cover to stake out and pounce on some small life the cats will toy with until it expires, a corpse they will pass and cross and ignore without twitching a tail in the stark morning’s judgment.

But I would be lying. I wake because every year’s ending, when the dark stretches longer and claims dominion over the light, shortens my rest and wakes me, unrested, wondering which work to resume, only to leave the question unanswered to confront the sun’s late ascent.

Though, with the light, comes many distractions. Below my window, spinning for days, a black spider ponders before moving one of her eight legs. It takes her a while to think, move, think, and move those needle-like legs, trembling in the wind that shakes the leaves of the plant she has chosen for weaving her web.

Yet, for all her ruminations, I can see the filaments of her gossamer musings shimmer in the light. When she settles under a leaf, I wonder at her seamless slipping from industry to quietude.

How can she wait? What else can beast or person do but endure waiting? In the still dark mornings, after my eyes open and slowly map out our bedroom from memory, I try to grasp something in my mind but it always slips away before I can trace its outlines.

These blue hours before light breaks like a seam in the horizon can be a strain. An acquaintance recently went home, complained he was tired, and went to bed. When his wife woke up, she found him lying on the floor, dead.

Not too long ago, a friend’s mother could not wake him up the morning after. I thought he would be in the office when we came back from a one-day holiday, reeling out another anecdote while we marked end-of-term papers. He was not.

That acquaintance had planned to drop by our home for an after-dinner chat. Our schedules didn’t match so we postponed. The beer could stay chilled in the fridge until he came, I thought. He will not.

There is a sleeping disorder that affects many people. In sleep apnea, there is an interval when one ceases to breathe. A sleep disorder specialist I interviewed showed me a room full of gadgets to diagnose and treat this condition, which can be life-threatening.

The specialist said that instead of surgery or an expensive gadget, a companion can sleep with you. Attuned to your breathing, she or he can shake you awake when you skip breathing.

In the still blue dawn, when I wake up, the thing that eludes, that escapes as soon as I start thinking about it, is the one thing I take for granted in the day’s distractions, in the fray: each breath I take.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 9, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Maypag-asa”

ON the eve of the 155th birth anniversary of the “Father of the Philippine Revolution,” I took Edsa lessons on history.

Last Nov. 29, I left the Diliman campus at 9 p.m.; I reached home at 2 a.m. on Nov. 30, the birthday of Andres Bonifacio and the reason behind the long weekend that turned commuting into a classic struggle.

The buses plying Edsa that night seemed to be the stuff of “hakot” dreams (practice of politicians to orchestrate “people power” through busloads of paid supporters).

Naturally, I listened to other people’s conversations as we were packed intimately like sardines in a can. “Ano ba meron (what’s up)?” asked a young female voice somewhere to the left behind me. “May sale sa Trinoma (is there a mall sale)?” responded the green-complexioned creature tapping the smart phone resting on my right arm.

Walking along Edsa lined thickly with commuters, I overheard haters of the usual suspects: ungrateful relatives, unappreciative bosses, and unfaithful Jade (why does no one ever curse the men these women are unfaithful with?).

It was nearly midnight as the second bus inched to BGC. My bus mates were outsourcing workers in a complicated relationship with their gadgets. As with the Edsa buses, which reduce passengers to stupor with a cocktail of soap drama, gag shows, and misogynist local movies, the BGC bus was completely silent until a man boarded on the next stop.

The fellow beside me glanced from his phone screen. Desultory chat about the “horrible” traffic. Long weekend coming up? asked the newcomer.

My seatmate confirmed: it’s a national holiday. National hero.

My eavesdropping self was elated: Finally! History remembered. This one even thinks Bonifacio the revolutionary deserves the honour that the American imperialists conferred on the reformist Rizal!
When the young men moved to the bus exits, my former seatmate added: Did you see his movie? Same guy promoting skin-whitening on Edsa!

I almost leapt out of the bus to chase that fellow: Which hero? What movie?

From a gigantic billboard in Ortigas, an actor smiles languorously at those who dream of bleached skin. The actor played Gregorio del Pilar, a hero of the Philippine-American War but certainly not the Supremo.

History documents that Bonifacio signed with his own blood a compact with fellow Katipuneros to liberate Filipinos from Spanish colonizers. He chose as his secret name, “Maypag-asa”.

“Hope” is a strange weapon to arm oneself with in a struggle against all odds.

Did Bonifacio foresee that, more than a century after the Philippine Revolution ended, we would have to summon this as we wage battle with historic amnesia and its champion, a giant Edsa billboard selling bleached dreams?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 2, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”